Oracle Tuxedo: A New way to Run PHP Applications

The Oracle Tuxedo team have posted an Oracle Tuxedo 11.1.1.2 Web
Application Server Demo for PHP. It is a VirtualBox VM so you can
immediately test it out. The free VM is available from OTN's Pre-Built Developer VMs page.

Oracle Tuxedo provides a scalable and highly available mid tier
platform capable of managing and integrating heterogeneous
applications. This overview datasheet explains its capabilities: "Oracle
Tuxedo provides a service-oriented infrastructure for efficiently
routing, dispatching, and managing requests, events, and application
queues across system processes and application services". A raft
of other material is on the Tuxedo landing page. There is also a new white paper on PHP being
reviewed at this very moment.

The VM uses Oracle Linux 5.6. It has PHP 5.3 and Oracle Tuxedo
11.1.1.2 installed and configured. The SALT and TSAM components of
Tuxedo are also available.

Tuxedo's PHP support comes in the form of a new mod_tuxedo module
for Apache 2.2 (or Oracle HTTP Server). This handles all PHP scripts,
executing them using managed PHP processes. Existing applications can
run normally:

Tuxedo also lets PHP be exposed as a web service:

The tutorial manual provided inside the VM steps through using PHP
in both ways. The NetBeans IDE, Oracle Database XE and MySQL are
included on the VM to make it easier to carry out your own further
experiments with Tuxedo and PHP.

Tuxedo has been around for a long time and has an established
customer base. If you look at Oracle Database's big TPC-C benchmark's
you can see Tuxedo was involved. It's even certified on Exalogic. The new dynamic language support in Tuxedo
is going to open up "Enterprise" infrastructure, making it easy to
integrate modern solutions in a heterogeneous environment.

When I get back from the Dutch PHP and PHP|Tek conferences, which
run back to back from next week, I plan to write up more details about
using Tuxedo and PHP.